Welcome

Welcome to the home of Raleigh/Durham North Carolina based jazz guitarist Kevin Van Sant! Here you will find information about me and my music. You can browse my photo galleries and video library. Direct from this site you can also listen to and buy my music in downloadable digital form. And if you are looking to book a jazz group you will find detailed information and samples of the various configurations I can provide for your event. If you are interested in taking private lessons in person or via Skpe, there is more information about that too.

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What's New

I have always had a fondness for analogies. To me a good analogy allows for an easier connection to or understanding of something that on the surface you may not be familiar with. I find myself using analogies with students all the time, the are so many great analogies which apply to learning an instrument and learning jazz music and improvisation (jazz music as a language for example). Occasionally I may make one that's a bit far fetched, but I've seen how generally with my students I can witness an "ah ha" moment with the aid of a good analogy. With a blog post today on the similarities between the improvising musician and a tennis player I am beginning a series of posts on some of my favorite analogies. Let me know what you think, or what are some of your favorites?

Welcome if you've found my site for the first time and welcome back if you've been here before. Those in the latter category will have noticed the new look. This is the first overhaul I've done to my website in about eight or nine years. It's been long overdo!

I created my first web page back around 1996 when the World Wide Web was just beginning to become accessible to internet users at home. Back then the design options were pretty limited by the primitive HTML coding. But the plus side of that was it was really easy to learn HTML from checking out the source code of any website that had a cool feature. In 1996 simple tables would have been considered a cool feature! So for a while I, with no background or training in programming, was able to keep up with the advances to HTML while having fun redesigning my site while putting in cutting edge features I'd learn from studying other webpages that caught my eye. As the web and corresponding HTML language grew rapidly I would periodically re-do my website taking advantage of the new design possibilities and the increasing available bandwidth. Mine was actually one of the first sites to use Flash, and an early incarnation of my website had a small blurb written about it in Newsweek magazine. It finally got to the point where the coding involved in a full featured website had become far too sophisticated and advanced to be easily learned and implemented by a mere hobbyist such as myself. It has truly become the domain of actual programmers!

That's the main reason I haven't done a significant reboot of my website in so long, I just don't have the programming chops to improve on what I had last created whenever it was. But I had put a ton of work into the last incarnation and, if I do say so myself, I think it actually still looked pretty good and contemporary even by today's standards. So for a long while I was content to just make minor edits and add new content without doing another overhaul.

But finally the time had come, and faced with the daunting task of a complete redesign and rebuild of the entire site, I explored some of the new HTML5 website building options available on online platforms. After a lot of research I settled on Bandzoogle.com. There are quite a number of similar platforms out there but I liked that their features are set up specifically for the needs of an independent musician/band. So here I am, or here we are, the beginning of the next incarnation of my website. I am excited about the dynamic nature of HTML5 and the integration possibilities across the various platforms we musicians may be using. I think it will prove to be easier to keep the content here growing and up to date so I'm excited about that too. For now, as a learn my way around the new platform, I guess this is a work in progress that will hopefully continue to develop.

So thanks for stopping by, please check back from time to time to see what's new and what I'm up to.

Ongoing weekly Wednesday night solo guitar gig at Academy St Bistro in downtown Cary. Come out for the great food and casual atmosphere. I'll be out on the patio if it's nice enough or indoors if weather dictates.

Ongoing weekly Wednesday night solo guitar gig at Academy St Bistro in downtown Cary. Come out for the great food and casual atmosphere. I'll be out on the patio if it's nice enough or indoors if weather dictates.

Ongoing weekly Wednesday night solo guitar gig at Academy St Bistro in downtown Cary. Come out for the great food and casual atmosphere. I'll be out on the patio if it's nice enough or indoors if weather dictates.

Ongoing weekly Wednesday night solo guitar gig at Academy St Bistro in downtown Cary. Come out for the great food and casual atmosphere. I'll be out on the patio if it's nice enough or indoors if weather dictates.

Ongoing weekly Wednesday night solo guitar gig at Academy St Bistro in downtown Cary. Come out for the great food and casual atmosphere. I'll be out on the patio if it's nice enough or indoors if weather dictates.

Ongoing weekly Wednesday night solo guitar gig at Academy St Bistro in downtown Cary. Come out for the great food and casual atmosphere. I'll be out on the patio if it's nice enough or indoors if weather dictates.

Ongoing weekly Wednesday night solo guitar gig at Academy St Bistro in downtown Cary. Come out for the great food and casual atmosphere. I'll be out on the patio if it's nice enough or indoors if weather dictates.

Ongoing weekly Wednesday night solo guitar gig at Academy St Bistro in downtown Cary. Come out for the great food and casual atmosphere. I'll be out on the patio if it's nice enough or indoors if weather dictates.